Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.
Steven WeinbergAs you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.
Steven WeinbergI have a friend โ or had a friend, now dead โ Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about itโฆ and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and itโs a good thing too.
Steven WeinbergThe effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven WeinbergIt was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Steven Weinberg